Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Have Received Retailer Offers For Stuff They Don’t Want

Ever receive an email offer from a retailer for apparel or accessories you wouldn’t buy in a million years? Something that made you ask,“what were they thinking?”– like an offer on kids’ shoes, when you don’t have any children? Or for men’s underwear, when you’re a single woman?

We know this type of irrelevant email is annoying – that’s one reason we started Shop It To Me. But we were curious about how big a problem this really is and decided to conduct a survey to find out. After all, retailers collect lots of data on what we buy, so they should be able to guess what we want. Right?

Wrong!

Our survey (conducted online by Harris Interactive) of more than 2,000 U.S. adults age 18 and older found that 63% have received “irrelevant” emails for clothing, accessories and shoes in the past three months. Here’s what else we learned:

• 34% received emails offering items that are too expensive
• 32% received offers for “styles I don’t wear”
• 22%, for “designers/brands I don’t like”
• 22%, for the wrong age group
• 18%, for the wrong gender

The problem doesn’t appear to discriminate by income, age, education or marital status — although women are more likely to receive off-target email offers than men (66% vs. 60%, respectively), while men are more likely to get offers for the wrong gender than women (23% vs. 13%). Women also are more likely than men to receive email offers for items that are too expensive (40% vs. 29%).

Interestingly, only 30% of U.S. adults say they’ve received email offers that were sent without their permission in the past three months. Which begs the question: why sign up for emails when so many of the offers are off-target?

At Shop It To Me, we don’t guess what you want. We only send you relevant sale news about the items you want, in your sizes, from your favorite brands. And, since we partner with more than 100 retailers, you can clear all the clutter out of your mailbox without ever missing a sale you definitely DON’T want to skip!

Click here to update your brand preferences to ensure Shop it to Me has you covered this holiday season.

Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Shop It To Me from November 19-21, 2013 among 2,082 adults ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact Margie Cader at margie@mcaderpr.com.